‘Mmm, but you’ll stay at St John’s?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, we’ll have to go back to Trevor Square next term, anyway, because Mummy’s flat won’t be ready.’ Bettina had bought a tiny apartment in Brighton, where she would be able to keep up attendance at the bridge club.
‘But what about Christmas?’ Cathy was anxious for herself as well as her sister. ‘You can’t not be with your family at Christmas.’
‘What family? – you’re the only family I’ve got, Cathy. You’re the only one who really cares. Isn’t that what a family is – people who care about each other?’
Cathy telephoned Lady Davina, who in turn rang Mrs Emanuel and patronized her so lavishly that she was reassured about her role in the drama and agreed to have Monty until the Trevor Square house was open again in mid-January.
The Emanuels were acutely uncomfortable with their guest, but hid the fact by spoiling her. Behind closed doors, Rosanna wrangled with her parents over the best way to integrate the stranger into their household at Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights which the Emanuels, like many liberal families in British Jewry, used as a pretext for following the secular forms of Christmas.
The apartment’s vast sitting room looked like a Hollywood set for Queen Victoria’s Christmas, with a massive fir tree smothered in swags of ribbon and gifts wrapped exquisitely by Rosanna. Monty adored the lavishness of it all, and the genuine religious feeling she detected in the domestic ceremonies of lighting candles and singing songs. The Emanuels seemed to her to be much more like a real family than her own, even if Mrs Emanuel did make monstrous attempts to direct her children’s lives. Fifty people, all related to the family, sat down to Christmas dinner. Monty looked on enviously as the succession of uncles, aunts, cousins crowded through the door for the week of banqueting which followed.
‘You’ve got an awful lot of family,’ she said to Simon one morning as they were awaiting the day’s influx of relatives.
‘Too much.’ He stood sourly by the window. ‘I’m sick of them all asking me when I’m going to join the business. My mother puts them up to it – it’s just another of her ways of pressuring me.’
Mrs Emanuel anxiously spoiled Monty, fearful that she was in some way a spy in their midst who would catch the family out in its great pretence of fitting into British society. Monty was taken to the opera, to recitals, to concerts, to half a dozen parties whose extravagant elegance dazzled her.
‘Rosanna – have you done your practice? Rosanna – go do your practice now, later you will be too tired.’ Every day Mrs Emanuel unnecessarily nagged her daughter towards perfection. One evening a famous soprano came to the house to hear Rosanna sing and both parents anxiously questioned her about Rosanna’s training. Should she study in Paris? in New York? Vienna? How good was she, really, no really, how good?
Monty was entranced. Accustomed to Bettina sneering, ‘Must you play that ghastly piano?’ or ‘Stop banging that damn piano, for heaven’s sake,’ it seemed like a dream of good fortune to be born into a family where music was a valued talent not a dangerous vice.
‘Now, Monty, you must play with Rosanna,’ Mrs Emanuel commanded one day.
‘Yes, play for us, we want to hear you – Rosanna is always better with her friends,’ Mr Emanuel added, and so Monty sat down at the velvet-black grand piano and accompanied Rosanna in one of their school pieces.
‘But you play beautifully, doesn’t she, Mother?’ Mr Emanuel became talkative with surprise and indignation. ‘Why don’t your parents make you study?’
The fact was that neither her mother nor, when he was alive, her father, had the faintest notion of the value of art, talent or study. Monty sensed that her present audience would not understand that. Instead she said, ‘We aren’t a very musical family, I suppose.’ Mr Emanuel shook his head in wonder.
‘She sings beautifully too, don’t you, Monty?’ Rosanna was full of encouraging enthusiasm.
Before Monty had time to feel embarrassed, Rosanna played the introduction to one of the madrigals they had sung at school and took the soprano part so that Monty had to sing in the lower registers which showed off the mature tone of her voice. It was an idiotic song full of ‘hey-nonny-noes’ and Monty hated it, but Rosanna’s parents applauded them with admiration.
‘Wonderful! Wonderful voice you have! Doesn’t she, Joseph?’
‘Lovely, my dear, quite lovely. And you haven’t studied at all?’ He plainly found this an extraordinary example of parental neglect. The next day, after a secret conference with Rosanna, Mr Emanuel suggested that Monty join his daughter at her singing lessons during the holiday, and for a fortnight they shared a daily lesson with the Covent Garden soprano who came to the apartment to teach them.
The Emanuels treated her as a charity case, a poor child deprived of music. Except Simon. Simon treated Monty as young men often treat women with whom they are acutely in love; he barely spoke to her, fidgeted when she was around and stared at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
‘Do you want me to show you how to play the guitar?’ Simon appeared in the sitting room one afternoon. The weak winter sun streamed in from the leafless park outside. Rosanna and her mother had gone to Fortnum and Mason to exchange unwanted presents and Monty was amusing herself at the piano.
‘Fabulous!’ She got up and went to sit beside Simon on the sofa, taking up the Spanish guitar he handed to her. By now, Monty knew enough about men to know that this was one of those invitations not to be taken at face value.
‘Press harder,’ Simon ordered, positioning the fingers of her left hand, ‘use the tips of your fingers.’ He put his arm around her to show her how to press the strings against the frets in the neck.
‘But my fingers aren’t strong enough,’ Monty complained. She smelt the faint, rich aroma of his body and the vague scent of aftershave, felt the warmth of his flesh through his cashmere sweater. Monty’s interest in the guitar began to evaporate.
‘Your fingers will get stronger in time, and the tips will harden. Here, feel how mine are.’ Obediently she touched his fingers with hers, then looked up towards him as their hands interlaced. Simon put the guitar down on the floor and pulled her towards him, breathless with elation. Monty opened her lips under his and lay back on the sofa, her senses swimming. The warm silence of the apartment seemed to roar in her ears as she surrendered to the responses of her body. Whatever it was that had held her back with the boys at the dances, it had gone now. Kissing Simon felt right.
‘I feel as if I’ve known you all my life,’ she murmured as they finally drew apart.
‘Me too. You’ve got fantastic eyes.’
‘They turn up though.’
‘That’s what I like about them.’ Monty smiled. All the boys said she had fantastic eyes. Whatever dumb magic they had, she was glad it worked on Simon too.
They kissed again and she felt his hand hover over her breast, not daring to caress, so she arched her back and pressed her body against him. Simon, used to the elaborate teases of the ‘nice’girls he had kissed before, felt ready to explode with lust and gratitude.
For an hour they revelled in their new conspiracy, then tidied the sofa and went to make coffee in the immense kitchen, where Rosanna and Mrs Emanuel found them on their return. Monty and Simon put on what they thought was an Oscar-winning performance of innocence, in which their complicity was blatantly apparent.
Monty could not sleep that night. She went into the marble-tiled guest bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She felt different, but she couldn’t see it. Somewhere on her face it must show – how could she look the same when inside she was in love for the first time?
At the first opportunity, Mrs Emanuel said to her son, ‘Monty is a very nice girl, Simon, but you won’t get too fond of her – Simon – promise me? You understand me, Simon?’
‘Of course, Mother, I promise, don’t worry,’ he answered lightly. It was not a false vow. No degree of fondness
would be too great for Monty, Simon thought.
‘I’m in love,’ Monty told her sister three months later. They were back at college, and back at the Bourton house in Trevor Square under Lady Davina’s critical eye. Simon had taken Monty out as often as he dared, while Cathy had stayed in, with a borrowed sewing machine, painstakingly copying some of Rosanna’s prettiest dresses; she had discovered that even at wholesale prices the frocks she liked best were too expensive.
With great care, Monty zipped up her sister’s white dress for Queen Charlotte’s Ball.
‘With Rosanna’s brother?’ Cathy pulled up the long white gloves, which reached over her elbows.
‘Yes, with Simon. Oh, Cathy, don’t you think he’s dishy?’
‘I suppose he is good-looking but Mummy’ll never let you marry him.’ She pulled critically at the thick garland of artificial gardenias around the dress’s scooped neckline.
‘I don’t want to marry him, I’m in love, that’s all. You look fab. The chinless wonders won’t be able to resist you.’ Monty accepted Cathy’s ambition although she did not share it. Her sister’s marriage had become the preoccupying business of them both.
Cathy studied her reflection in the murky depths of the glass in her room at Trevor Square. Under the white silk gown her figure was as slender as a model’s. In fact, Cathy had already been invited by a society magazine to model some clothes for a special feature on model debutantes. Her glossy dark hair, cut in a geometric bob by Vidal Sassoon, swung against her faintly hollow cheeks, contrasting with her pale pink lipstick. Her eyes seemed smoky and enormous.
‘I think I’ll do.’ She smiled with satisfaction and gave Monty a hug. ‘You won’t do anything stupid, Monty darling, will you?’
‘If you mean don’t get pregnant, don’t worry. We’re being very careful. Aren’t you dying to be in love, Cathy?’
Cathy sighed. She could see her sister glowing with excitement, and longed to feel the same way, but she knew that her own emotional make-up was different. In the bottom of her heart, Cathy wondered if she were capable of such violent feelings.
‘He’ll come soon, I just know he will,’ Monty promised her.
‘Who will?’
‘Mr Right.’
‘The Earl of Right, you mean.’ They caught each other’s eyes in the mirror and giggled.
Queen Charlotte’s Ball at the beginning of April marked the official start of the debutante season. Cathy joined forty other selected maidens in white gowns to pull a vast cardboard wedding cake across the ballroom floor with white ribbons. William Hickey of the Daily Express, the most influential gossip column, tipped her for the ‘Deb of the Year’title and, to Monty’s fury, printed a picture of both of them with a caption reading ‘Cathy and Miranda, daughters of the suicide peer, Lord James Bourton.’
Caroline, ignored by the photographers, and not selected for the cake ceremony, stamped grimly off to college next morning while the Bourton sisters were awarded breakfast in bed by Lady Davina.
‘And Charles Coseley has accepted!’ she triumphed, waving a sheet of blue embossed writing paper which bore two lines of the electro-cardiograph handwriting boys acquired at Eton. ‘Now don’t let us down, Cathy. We’re relying on you.’
As the previous autumn’s tea parties had progressed, Lady Davina had decided on a late July dance for Cathy and Caroline. The funds from the felling of the West Wood would provide for a thousand guests and, as she had watched Cathy quietly charm and manipulate the girls who were prime targets, Lady Davina had realized that there would be no trouble in pledging a handsome number of return invitations.
There would be no trouble, either, in making the Bourton dance one of the grandest of the season. After sympathizing with Caroline’s mother over the strain and bother of organizing it all, and hearing Lady Davina make all manner of old-fashioned suggestions, Cathy calmly took control of the operation. She hired a young cousin of the Queen to organize the affair and between them the dance was planned in elaborate details; a discotheque, a pop group, an immense dance floor laid over the priceless parquet of the ballroom, garlands of flowers around every table, a small fun fair set up in the home paddock and a second dance floor of Perspex built over the top of the ornamental lake.
‘Darling, aren’t you the teeniest bit nervous? I was simply shattered with nerves before my dance.’ A germ of doubt nagged Lady Davina as she watched her protégée approach her great day so calmly. Was this completely normal? Suppose all the serenity suddenly collapsed and she cracked up at the last moment?
‘I suppose I should be wound up, but I don’t feel it, honestly. We’ve planned everything for months, there’s nothing we’ve forgotten, I’ve done everything you said, now …’ Cathy didn’t finish. She couldn’t think of an elegant way to say that the only thing she cared about was getting Charles Coseley to ask her to dance.
She had made a close friend of his cousin Venetia, scanned the society magazines for snippets of gossip and subtly but relentlessly turned every conversation to the end of finding out everything she could about her target.
Charles Coseley, the Earl of Laxford, was twenty-nine, and personally worth £15 million; when he succeeded to his father’s title of Marquess of Shrewton, he would also inherit houses in London, Wiltshire and Yorkshire, with a total fortune of over £200 million. There was a villa in the South of France, and a yacht; Charlie Coseley liked gambling, dancing, polo, shooting, crashing his E-Type Jaguar and, most of all, girls. He’d been out with all the most glamorous girls of the previous Season and none of them had lasted more than six weeks.
‘Charlie’s awful, really, you must warn your sister,’ Venetia told Cathy one afternoon when they had returned to Trevor Square after an exhausting afternoon scouring the Chelsea boutiques. ‘He just goes for one bird after another, drives them crazy with flowers and phone calls, then as soon as he’s got them – bang, finished, all over.’
‘How odd.’ Cathy widened her eyes inquiringly at Venetia; she knew all she had to do was look receptive and she’d be told everything she needed to know.
‘He pesters them to sleep with him and then as soon as they do, he’s off. My uncle and aunt are getting rather worried, actually. He is the heir, after all.’
‘Mmmm.’ Cathy passed Venetia a dark blue china mug with ‘opium’written on it in large gold letters. It contained tea. They had bought the mug in Carnaby Street. ‘And he goes a bit far, really,’ Venetia continued contentedly. ‘He’s so good-looking he can get any girl he wants and they’re all heartbroken. Some stupid little dolly tried to commit suicide when he dumped her last year.’
‘Good heavens. Does he sleep with all his girlfriends?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Sugar?’
Following Lady Davina’s advice, Cathy read the polo reports in The Field every week and demanded that all her dates should take her to the Garrison and the Saddle Room, the nightclubs Venetia said Charlie frequented. She saw him once or twice, always with a different, stunning girl, but he obviously never noticed her. She realized that she was not his type of girl at all. He went for the girls in the shortest mini-skirts and the most transparent dresses, with the longest blonde hair and the most heavily made-up eyes. Cathy felt awkward in very revealing clothes and knew that an understated, natural style of dress suited her best.
‘How the hell am I going to get him when he doesn’t even know I exist?’ Cathy asked herself in desperation as she watched Charlie’s elegant limbs vibrating through the Shake on the Saddle Room’s dance floor. Opposite him was yet another rangy blonde, wearing a gold crochet dress over a hideous, flesh-coloured bodystocking.
‘What are you looking so moody about?’ Cathy’s date drawled rudely. ‘I hate moody birds, come on and dance.’ They edged into the crowd and Cathy flung herself into sensual gyrations, hoping to catch Charlie’s eye at last but succeeding only in winding a young Guards officer on her left.
‘How much money do you think she paid for that old rope?’
she bitched as Charlie and the blonde left the floor. The glittering crochet dress attracted everyone’s attention.
‘Well, it won’t be enough to tie old Charlie down, whatever it cost,’ her date answered with envy.
In the taxi home afterwards Cathy sat inertly while her date half-smothered her with kisses. She felt nothing except rather sticky around the face; she was deep in thought, pondering the impossible problem of Charlie Coseley, the man she loved, whose fortune would save her family.
Simon took Monty to the Ad Lib Club, a dark penthouse high in a modern skyscraper where the pop groups played, and those who were not playing came to drink Scotch and Coke and mingle. It was the exclusive haunt of the new meritocracy; everyone was hustling or being hustled. Like a shoal of piranhas the success-hungry crowd fastened on the stars – George Harrison in a pair of jeans, Mick Jagger in a flowered shirt, David Bailey with Jean Shrimpton.
Simon Emanuel, his arm around Monty, was there to fix a niche for himself in the music business. Since the name ‘Emanuel’meant money, there were plenty of two-bit shysters to take him on, but Simon was after the musicians and that was harder.
‘They think I’m just a rich Jewish kid trying to buy into the scene,’ he told Monty. ‘I know they’d change their tune if they heard me play, but I can’t just get on stage and jam with the Stones.’
‘Why not?’ said Monty. ‘Everyone else does.’ It was one of the Ad Lib’s unique attractions.
‘Yes, but they’re different.’ Simon meant that the Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, and all the rest were lean, mean, working-class kids, who were more hostile to outsiders even than the traditional élite. From the perspective of the music business, he was on the wrong side of the class barrier.
Monty and Simon would leave the Ad Lib at three or four in the morning, and stay together in the dangerous darkness of Trevor Square kissing and petting until the dawn. At first, they were frightened of discovery, but then Monty realized that Lady Davina took a sleeping pill every night.
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